The Third Way Reconfigured: How and Why Nonprofit Organizations are Shifting Their Human Resource Management

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are facing increasing demands to become more efficient and effective, especially given increasing
financial cutbacks, the rising demand for services and the push toward performance-related management. Human resource management
(HRM) is claimed to play an important role in coping with these challenges. Yet, within the field of nonprofit management,
little is known about the configuration of HR architectures in NPOs, let alone their impact on performance. To bridge this
gap, we conduct an exploratory multiple case study in ten health and social services NPOs. The case study data indicates a
shift toward a dominant strategic orientation in the configuration of HRM. Our article makes a central contribution by uncovering
a third way in which NPOs seek a specific configuration of HRM to confront the challenges they face in their internal and
external environments.